One of the observations I made during my brief yet all too long stint in the industry is that a lot of the recruited entry-level talent were likely only really viable hires due to piracy, especially on the artist side. Non-affluent youngsters like myself cut their teeth modding games and whatnot with cracked versions of Photoshop, 3DS Max, Maya or just noodling around in Flash (etc. etc.). There was certainly no way I’d have been able to afford those price tags at that time. Sure, some offered student versions but these were still pricey for a pauper and often came with usage restrictions that would’ve made them worthless one way or another anyway.
Not to mention that just modding itself is sometimes a grey-area falling foul of same copyright infringement laws set up to combat piracy (though I personally only mucked around with stuff that had official SDKs).
Things likely have changed somewhat since the mid naughties. There’s some quality OSS software out there now (like Blender) for a start.
All this to say; if the game industry execs got their wish and an uncrackable DRM system came out, it would not all be gain for them. Long-term, they might even have to start investing in their staff. Imagine!
Yeah, back in the bygone days of yore I pirated the heck out of games or helped others to pirate them, via trading discs and copying them. Literally passing disks around a circle of IRL friends and we’d each take a turn burning a copy. Because I was a dumb teen and didn’t think anything of it. My buddy has a game I want to play. I have blank disks. I have a game he wants, and he has blank disks. Why wouldn’t we trade them for a day or two and burn copies for keepsies? The only thing that troubled us was the actual physical protection like password discs or those weird color obscured password sheets, but teens have a ton of time to get around that stuff. What can I say? Teenagers are jerks.
In June, FaZe members Kay, Jarvis, Nikan and Teeqo were involved in the launch of an alt-coin (an alternative to things like Bitcoin and Ethereum) called Save The Kids. The big sell for this particular token was the promise that a percentage of proceeds from sales would go to charity, and Kotaku reports that the coin attracted plenty of influencers.
Naturally, fans of the esports personalities signed on and paid up to get their hands on these coins. A day or two later, however, and crypto did what crypto does best. The value of the coin crashed, hitting anyone still holding onto one with a massive loss.
Another thing I remember is, the studio I worked at had a ‘games library’ which was pretty much exactly what you expect - a whole bunch of games bought by the studio for staff members to check out and return as they saw fit. Ostensibly for ‘research’.
I’m sure there’s some fancy pants legal wrangling there that meant it was all totally legitimate, of course. Though quite what the effective difference was vs. pirating things I’m not sure though. I can only imagine the apoplectic fit the software industry would have if the muggles tried to set up something similar (NB I have no idea how common this practice really is).
At least I got to research the hell out of Saints Row 2. Funny thing is, if I hadn’t, my co-op buddy would not have bought a copy of Saints Row 2. And later, we probably would not have bought 2 copies each of Saints Row 3, 4 and 4.5.
Today, if you want a job in the industry as an artist, I would think going to school for a degree in game art would be the optimal path for most. I know the school where I work provides its game art students with access to the tools they need. Of course, you have to be able to afford to go to college, too…
I know some that got their gigs (artist isn’t a long term salaried position at game company these days unfortunately) at game companies by being very prolific and hustling/posting constantly on social media without having gone to game/art school proper.
Unless you’re a more senior creative lead/director art jobs are increasingly farmed out to overseas talent or just done in preproduction.
To get stability, they had to get real jobs at educational software type places.
All very true, from what I’ve seen as well. One reason for going to school and getting an actual BS or BA/BFA with your technical training is the flexibility to explore careers outside of just one niche. I am constantly urging our game students in all disciplines to think about the things they like doing, in a bunch of different contexts, and not just limiting themselves to the single context of game development. We also hope to position our graduates for beginning jobs a cut above the run of the mill revolving-door entry level positions, but that of course is a challenge when the job pool is full of people willing to do nearly anything to work for a game company it seems.
Does the serious business of modding games go here as well? Nexusmods is doing a thing.
Mod authors who have placed their mods on the site will soon no longer be able to completely remove them from the site. The change may (or may not) reduce donations to the authors while increasing revenue to the site itself.
So Nexus was and is kinda scummy, but OTOH if you want to be prickly about derivative works and controlling the distribution of your work as a creator, maybe modding isn’t the best choice.
It might reduce direct donations, but it will also bring in more people to modding who don’t want to deal with delete mods because some prima dona doesn’t like derivatives of their derivatives, including collections.
Why would this be an issue? Like, every studio does this. Usually with movies and books, too. It’s not like they’re lending them to the general public.
The film, music and software industries (and, I guess, publishing too) have fought tooth and nail to move copyright laws and certain technologies in a direction to try and prevent that exact sort of thing from happening at all.
It’s hypocritical. That they’re doing it themselves is a tacit acknowledgement that there is tangible benefit in ‘not paying for things but getting to experience them anyway’.
I also wonder if they hired someone to go through all those mountains of EULAs to ensure they weren’t violating anything in those highly enforceable and watertight piles of legalese.
I used to go to the library all the time when I was young, and poor. Guess it was a bad thing, though. We should shut those things down.
That’s an interesting angle. If we have any IP lawyers here, maybe they could weigh in, but what is the reasoning and law behind a library being ok but a software lending library not being ok? I’m sure there are some arcane reasons here!
